The Message of Easter
Good Friday Christians, Easter Christians, and a reading of Bart Ehrman's new book
In recent years, I have kept up with the work of Bart Ehrman, a University of North Carolina professor and village atheist of American New Testament studies. His books offer worthwhile insight into the Bible and early Christian history—even if his conclusions sometimes seem motivated by a desire to sell books or keep up his “bad boy” image among exvangelicals.
Armageddon, Ehrman’s recently published book on Revelation, fits this mold pretty well: good prose, a few valuable insights, moments of real rage at conservative Evangelicals, and a large dash of motivated reasoning. But his primary claim in this particular book has stuck with me like nothing in his other works. It even caught the attention of CNN, wherehe ran an opinion piece on CNN Easter morning with the same core argument, an argument that, though incorrect, just might help us hear the Easter message anew.
Ehrman sees the Jesus of Revelation as different than the Jesus of the Gospels. In his view, John of Patmos replaced the Gospel portrayals of a Jesus who came to serve others with a Jesus who came to lord it over his followers (“minions”) and destroy his enemies. Conservative Christians, Ehrman argues, have chosen Revelation’s Jesus.
In his CNN opinion piece, Ehrman writes that Revelation’s Jesus is popular among Christians who ignore Good Friday in favor of Easter. Good Friday Christians accept the uncertainty and darkness under the cross and, most importantly, the call to service and self-giving love. Easter Christians, by contrast, replace the Jesus of Good Friday with a triumphalist Jesus, rushing past the gloom of Golgotha to the glory of Sunday morning.
“Christian faith is not about service but sovereignty,” Ehrman writes about his former evangelical co-religionists, all of whom he pegs as Easter Christians. “What ultimately matters is not Jesus’ life and death — his humanity — but his resurrection and return.” The Jesus of the Gospels saw his mission differently. “Good Friday and Easter provide Jesus’ followers with a choice: Is life about service to others or the passion for glory?”
Ehrman’s claim brought me up short because I too experienced the gulf he sees between the cross and the empty tomb during my teens and early twenties. The triumph of Easter seemed to have little to do with Christ’s death on the cross, and not a few in our day who grew up in the church have felt the same abyss open beneath their feet when they tried to bring Friday and Sunday together. A good friend who no longer believes told me recently that he finds the idea disgusting that God would kill his son. “Why not just forgive humanity’s sins without the shedding of blood?” he asked me. Suggesting other theories of atonement might connect the cross and the empty tomb more clearly did nothing to dissuade him. Jesus’ murder and his resurrection just seemed too far apart.
My friend is choosing Good Friday. Many who continue to profess faith do too. Good Friday at least makes sense to us, and, thought of a certain way, some might even call it heroic. Even without the empty tomb, Jesus’ self-giving has inspired countless people to selfless action (think of Albert Schweizer), and these men and women live with the satisfaction that they tried to make the world a better, more humane place. Isn’t that, many Good Friday Christians might ask, what Christianity is all about? Few, by contrast, would call triumphalist Christian nationalists “selfless”—and it’s these folks that Ehrman means when he speaks of Easter Christians.
So we understand those who linger at the cross because the brilliance of Sunday seems manufactured or mythic or dangerous. But is taking Good Friday as our life model really doable on our own steam? Is it clear that bearing the metaphorical crosses we’re always talking about does much for the world? The answer is no. Apart from the resurrection, we must acknowledge that even Jesus’ life’s work ended in failure. The Jewish people by and large rejected his message, and as the years went by the church became ever more ensnared in lust for wealth and power. Two millennia after Jesus’s death, the world is still the world, and people are still people. If there were no resurrection, those of us who give our lives for others would be forgotten just like those who live for their desires.
Taking Good Friday by itself leads to despair. Taking Easter by itself leads to pride and triumphalism.
But what if the Christian story requires both Good Friday and Easter and neither moment makes sense except in light of the other? This is indeed the testimony of the New Testament. Christ’s obedience unto death was what led God to highly exalt him (Phil 2). The first Christians saw the resurrection as the vindication of the sort of life Christ led, one lived for others in love to the very limit. It shows that such self-giving love is actually “justified” and justifiable despite how the world looks—that because Christ is Lord, we can trust that “all things [really do] work for the good” of Jesus’s people (Romans 8). Seen this way, it shouldn’t surprise us that it’s not Christ’s death that justifies us, Paul writes in Romans 4:25, but his resurrection. Like Christ, our lives will be shown to have been justified, right, or well-lived when God vindicates us too by “giving life to our mortal bodies” (Romans 8).
As the Catholic theologian Herbert McCabe wrote, “We have made a world in which there is no way of being human that does not involve suffering.” Living in love and in obedience just doesn’t “work” in this world most of the time. It ends in rejection, exploitation, and misunderstanding as often as accomplishment, comfort, and success. Most would say living this way is foolish. But when Jesus took on our human nature, he knew “what was in a man.” He was fully aware of what the world is like. He didn’t expect the inherent goodness in people to win out or for the arc of history to bend toward justice. Yet he took on our nature anyway to reconcile us to God.
“Jesus was the first human being who had no fear of love at all,” McCabe wrote, “the first to have no fear of being human.” Yet, because of what sin has made of the world—because of what we have made of ourselves—love “seems a threat, because we are asked to give ourselves up, to abandon our selves; and so when we meet love we kill it.”
How could Jesus love in this way? Because he trusted completely in his Father. He obeyed even to the point of death—and, perhaps more importantly, apparent failure—precisely because he trusted God that a life lived in self-giving love for others would sooner or later be vindicated. The only possible form vindication could take, the only way such a life could seem justified, is if the Father raised him again to a new and unconquerable life.
And that is the story of Easter.
Telling the story this way helps me think more clearly about what comes of trust in God and obedience, and I’d recommend trying it on for size yourself. You probably won’t win the Bart Ehrmans of the world for Christ. But you might just discover a new clarity and joy in the message of Easter.